and animation for MinuteEarth and I have realized the most people don't have a clue of how digital
drawing is made. So, when presented with things like this [Mushroom Clouds Wallpaper] or this
[LionFish Wallpaper], they will believe its done with magic. But thats not true.
Not
entirely, at least. These drawings and all the digital illustrations
for MinuteEarth are made in Adobe Photoshop, which is a software, in principle, similar
to Microsoft Paint. If you are familiar with Paint, you know that you can draw freestyle,
change the pencil's thickness and color, fill closed regions, erase, zoom in, zoom out,
and if your hand shakes too much, add perfect shapes!
With enough time and patience, you can make pixel art!, Which is the digital version of
cross stitching (which is also very fun!) And while you could certainly paint pixel
by pixel to make your drawings, it could take WAY too much time. Also, pixel art will have
this, well, "pixelated" feeling and even if they don't have this feeling at first sight,
if you zoom enough you're going clearly to see those pixels.
Images made up of pixels
are known as raster graphics. In contrast, we have vector graphics which
won't get pixelated no matter how much you zoom in. You can make vector graphics in Adobe
Illustrator, Corel DRAW, Inkscape and even in PowerPoint. I mean, PowerPoint allows you
to make basic vector illustrations, given that you get rid of those horrible default
colors.
With vector graphics you can scale without
losing quality, change the shapes you already drew, rotate them, add gradients, make polygons,
edit them and even make fancy curves. Of course, PowerPoint is not the best tool if you're
into vector graphics, but you get the point. Vector drawings, in general, have a clean,
flat, minimalistic look. And while you could certainly make paintings with vectors, it
is not going to be an efficient process, because vectors are not meant for complex gradients,
textures or realism and because digital painting requires a graphics tablet.
You can still
paint with a mouse, but using a graphics tablet is faster and more comfortable.
Digital artists use a wide variety of software for painting, like Corel Painter or Krita,
however the most popular is Adobe Photoshop.. For starters, Photoshop, can use pen pressure
to adjust brush size, opacity, scattering, color and even shape! I mean, how cool is
this? This is still raster graphics, but you wont get those jaggies [anti-aliasing].
You can add gradients, vectors, text, edit photos, fix photos, fake photos and way more
things than you list in a video. One of the coolest things in Photoshop is
that you can draw in different layers, which means you can make a sketch in one layer,
and use it as a guide to draw the lineart in another layer, then hide the sketch, and
add color in another layer. This is a pretty cute drawing already, but lets make it
cooler! Add shadows by making a new layer and turning
it into a clipping mask which will allow you to draw only on top of the color.
Change the
layers blending mode to multiply and turn opacity down. Erase this stuff. Pick black
and make shadows. Create a new layer for the background, pick
the gradient tool and personalize it by adding a bunch of beautiful blues.
Select circular
gradient and you get a nice background Finally make a new layer and then using a
light blue make the rain. Change its blending mode to overlay. Fix and add some extra stuff
and there you go! A cool, simple and great thumbnail for a MinuteEarth video!
See you next time! ;).
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